Monday, May 30, 2016

This being memorial day weekend here, I've not been able to put together a business post for today. We're just too busy doing family stuff. Today I'm grabbing a chance, while my son watches his morning cartoons, to update ya'll about all the exciting things we have coming up this summer.

I cannot tell you how many Warcraft jokes were made on this hike...

More Than Just Pre-Orders

Thank you SO MUCH, all you wonderful people who've pre-ordered No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished! We already have 350+ pre-orders which, according to my records, is 150 more than we had 4 days in on the One Good Dragon pre-order launch. Woooo!

Now, just a little preview of what's going to happen with promotions this summer as we head towards our August 5th launch day, here's what you can look forward to on the Rachel Aaron / Heartstrikers front.

New Posters - oh boy do we have new posters! We have five new posters no less! This includes the much requested Marci and Ghost book 2 art poster (no words, just art). There's also a special poster coming that makes even me squee (not actually hard to do haha) and will surely melt ya'll when you see it.

Sample Chapters - Ready to actually read some of book 3? Later this summer (cough, when the book has been through more proofreading), we'll be putting sample chapters up for everyone to devour. Think of them as an appetizer for the main course.

Special Content - there's a chance that Rachel will be writing something special for Heartstrikers that isn't in the books. I'd call it a short story, but I think its actually going to be a fictional interview set within the Heartstrikers world. What's important to know is that it will only be available to people who are on the new release mailing list or those who join the list after it's been made. If you don't get it though, don't worry, its not essential reading for the series.

Anyway, there's lots to be excited about coming up! Stay tuned, subscribed, bookmarked, or whatever term applies these days.

Also, a lot of folks are asking Rachel questions about the other formats, so please allow me to answer.

Audio and Print for No Good Dragon...

We're doing our best to have print and audio for No Good Dragon Goes Unpunishedcome out same day as the eBook. It'll be a small miracle if that actually happens though. This is mainly because the manuscript will be coming out of the last rounds of quality control very close to the August 5th release date.

This doesn't give the other formats much time to line up. Print we might land, but audio will likely still be in production. Audible works fast though, we're getting it to them earlier this time, and so I expect that it will not be a long wait for the audio book. It will certainly be much shorter than the 4-5 months delay we had for One Good Dragon

That's not very committal, I'm sorry. The take away here is that we're much more on the ball this time about print and audio so no one will be left waiting as long for their favorite format to come available. Yay!

If you want to know the moment these new formats are up, join the mailing list. This is great if you don't want to miss a release, but don't read the blog every week.

Have a Great Holiday!

Or if you aren't in the USA, have a great Monday. As for me, I'm going to go answer my son's requests to play Castle Crashers now. ^_^

Friday, May 27, 2016

If you're part of my New Release Mailing List, you've already seen this (subscribers always get the good stuff first), so you can kick back enjoy being cool before it was cool. If you're not a subscriber and you want first dibs on all the new release info (and only new release info, I hate email spam as much as you do), signing up is easy. One click and you're in!

Click to see Chelsie and Heartstriker Mountain in full, glorious resolution!

At long last, the sequel to Nice Dragons Finish Last and One Good Dragon Deserves Another is just around the corner. Book 3 of my Heartstriker series, No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished, comes out August 5th, 2016!

Sure you could buy it then, but you could also preorder it right now and have the book delivered automatically to your Kindle at midnight on August 4th! How cool is that? You should definitely do it. Bob would want things that way. He cares deeply about your reading happiness.

And speaking of Bob's machinations, let's take a look at the blurb.

WARNING! BLURB CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR BOOK 2!! If you haven't read One Good Dragon Deserves Another, go do that first and then come back (or just scroll really fast down past the special text).

// BEGIN OGDDA SPOILERS

No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished...

When Julius overthrew his mother and took control of his clan, he thought he was doing right by everyone. But sharing power isn’t part of any proper dragon’s vocabulary, and with one seat still open on the new ruling Council, all of Heartstriker is ready to do whatever it takes to get their claws on it, including killing the Nice Dragon who got them into this mess in the first place.

To keep his clan together and his skin intact, Julius is going to have to find a way to make his bloodthirsty siblings play fair. But there’s more going on in Heartstriker Mountain than politics. Every family has its secrets, but the skeletons in Bethesda’s closet are dragon sized, and with Algonquin’s war looming over them all, breaking his clan wide open might just be the only hope Julius has of saving it.

// END OGDDA SPOILERS

There is so much more going on in this book than I could possibly fit in one blurb. There's more Bob, more Amelia, more Chelsie and Bethesda, and of course more Julius, Marci, and Ghost. Trust me, if you liked my other Heartstriker books, you're going to LOVE this one. It's dragon schemes all the way down!

Thank you as always for being my readers! If you're a reviewer and would like an advanced copy of the novel (or any of my books for that matter), please contact me and I'll be delighted to hook you up. I hope you're all as excited as I am about No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished!

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Over the last few weeks I've noticed my Writing Wednesday posts have been getting a bit broad of topic. This is fun for me, I love nothing more than a good wax poetic, but these WW posts are supposed to be about the craft of writing. So, for the next few weeks, I want to get back to basics and really dig into the nitty-gritty, nuts and bolts issues of putting together a good piece of fiction on the sentence and paragraph level.

But despite the obvious importance of these big issues, the problems I see most in books by new authors are not the big ones. It's the little stuff--dull prose, uninspired description, mediocre dialogue--that puts me off first. The book may have major character issues further on, or it may be a work of perfection, but if the sentence level writing is bad, then I'll never get far enough to find out. Life is simply too short to read a badly written book, especially when I have so many other excellent choices as a reader.

Fortunately, these little problems, though book killers if ignored, are some of the easiest to solve in our profession. Motivation, dramatic timing, proper pacing, imaginative plotting, great characters--this stuff is hard. This stuff is art. Learning to writing a nicely put together, functional paragraph? Easy peasy!

This isn't to say writing deathless prose is easy. Quite the opposite. Prose composition is one of those "easy to learn, hard to master" kind of things, which is why you hear stories about literary writers spending years on one paragraph. That said, this level of artistic effort is most definitely not the standard, nor should it be. Some readers love that deep, prose-as-poetry stuff, but there's a vast audience out there that just to read a story told competently and interestingly in a style that doesn't distract from the words are there to say, and that's what we're going to be focusing on in this blog series, which I'm calling Prose Summer Camp!

'Cause summer. And I love naming things. :)

Ready? Let's tackle the first and perhaps biggest bear on the docket: sentence level description.

**This is how I write. All of the tips below are drawn from my taste and experience as a writer. If you don't like my writing style, knowing how I craft sentences might not be useful. This is fine! Everyone writes in their own voice. I hope, of course, that you will still find some it helpful, but please don't take any of this as me setting down the One True Path of Writing. I'm just telling you what works for me in the hopes that it might also work for you.**

Monday, May 23, 2016

Travis here. Last Monday was about the how's and why's of a series relaunch. This week's post is about audio books. I'm gonna touch on the explosive and awesome growth of the audio book market and how you can get into it. Plus some tips I'd learned at RT about managing your audio production properly.

I hope, by the end of this, you'll be totally pumped to get audio editions of your own book or books made. Also, I'm going to talk about ACX a lot today. This is basically an ACX guide.

So let's talk,

All About Audio Books

Audio books used to be limited and crazy expensive. Why In My Day it was something like $100 for a box set of 3-4 western short stories. Also, the audio book section of the book store was a lonely, hidden shelf that a reasonably tall person had to bend down to see. It was sad.

Today though the audio book landscape is totally different. I mean, there were 43,000 audio books produced last year alone. One of the numbers I heard at RT2016 was that the audio book market has doubled every year for the last three years. That's fairly explosive by anyone's measure.

Yes Mr. Rock, that explosive

Rachel's and my personal experiences with audio book sales have been wonderful. We had 2k to 10k produced via ACX late last year for around $500 and it has already earned out. This is a book that's been out for a while and which we didn't really do any appreciable promotion for its audio release. That it has sold this well is a testament to the book but also to the strength of the growing audio book arena.

We've also signed deals with Audible for the audio book editions of Nice Dragons Finish Last, One Good Dragon, and the soon to be released No Good Dragon Goes Unpunished. So far this has resulted in awesome sales and an Audie award, which has knocked our socks off I must say.

Why Should You Go Audio?

First, more sales revenue is more better. I probably don't have to explain that part. Second, it's a new source of income that isn't fully coupled to print or ebook sales and sales channels. Additionally, audio book sales definitely affect ebook sales. Take a look at what happened with the Audie award.

NDFL eBook/KU sales.. May 13th was the announcement

Less dramatically, having an audio format helps sell more ebooks at a low level. Multiple formats makes your book(s) look official, more like a big deal, and that is very encouraging to customers in general. This effect is so well proven that Audible actively courts authors to make audio production happen. It's also good to know that having a print edition does this too. There's a reason CreateSpace likewise approaches authors with print services.

Lastly, consider market position. Audio books are growing fast, which means that getting in now and establishing presence, precedence, and audience are all investments that will grow with time. There's less competition in the audio book spaces, for now. It won't last forever.

Hopefully I've sold you on the many commercial reasons for having audio books made for your work.

Artistically, there's also the sheer cool factor of hearing your books narrated as well as just getting the story to an audience that otherwise would likely never read it. Consider the audio book customer, like I did in my customer stories a while back. Many are people who like books, but don't have time to sit and read books. They do, however, have space in their lives to listen to books.

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

I've had a bit more downtime than usual lately (waiting on a book to come back from the editor, the writer's vacation!), so I've been using it to be responsible and take care of non-writing writing business chores like updating my website and cleaning out my email box. (If you wrote me, I swear I'll get to you! I'm almost there!)

CLEARLY, I am a woman of systems, and yet I've never written a post about how I build my worlds. This is a massive oversight on my part, because of all novel-related activities, world building is the one I probably spend the most time on. I'm not sitting down every day and drawing up family trees for my characters or anything like that, but I am constantly thinking and daydreaming about my worlds and people That's all world building really is: structured imagining.

But while this freedom to play God can be amazingly fun and powerful, it can also be enough rope to hang yourself. I can't tell you how many authors I've seen go down (or how many of my own books I've killed) thanks to badly thought out world building.

With that and mind, let's take a look at the system I use to keep my own acts of fictional godhood on track.

Writing Wednesday: Three Steps to Creating a Better (Fictional) World

Pretty picture, but they forgot all the X-ed out continents and scrapped civilizations!

Before we go into how I build my worlds, let's talk about the ultimate goal of world building, which is to create a fictional setting that 1) makes internal sense, 2) is a new and exciting (or at least interesting) place to be, and 3) feels real when you read about it. If any of these three requirements are lacking, you're going to have a bad time. It doesn't matter how amazing your characters or intense your plot, if your world makes no sense, is cliched or boring, or just doesn't feel like a real place, readers aren't going to want to go there.

Part of the allure of fiction (and not just genre. Contemporary lit authors don't get to skip out on world building just because they're writing about real places) is the chance to go somewhere new and cool. When people talk about reading to escape, your world is the place they're escaping to. It might just be background, but if that background is shoddy and poorly thought out, the work as a whole will suffer.

Well, that's kind of the rub, because the specific system of how I build each of my worlds varies according to the needs of that world and story. Sometimes, if the world and its secrets are a very important part of the metaplot like they was in my Eli Monpress books, I have to world build freaking everything. Other times, when the world is just a stage for other dramas, as it is in my Heartstrikers books, I...still world build a ton, but as a percent of total work, setting building pales in comparison to the time I spend on the characters and their histories.

That said, while the actual process of world building will always vary from world to world and book to book, there are three general methods I always follow to keep my settings solid and myself sane. But first, a disclaimer.

As always, I'm not saying this is the one true way. This is just how I world build. Obviously I hope my tactics will work for you like they do for me, but every writer works and thinks differently. There is no right or wrong way to imagine your worlds. Take with a grain of salt and always remember that you are your own writer. Do what works for you!!

Monday, May 16, 2016

Last week I talked about Rachel and my teamwork. This week, I'd like to return to the train of marketing posts I'd been working by talking about rebranding and relaunching old series. If you have an older book or series out there, then I think that you'll find there's a lot you can still do with it. Also, for those you who launched a book and maybe didn't hit the mark on the marketing of it, this post should contain a number of useful segments.

So why should someone relaunch a series? What does that entail? What should they watch out for? Onward!

Should You Relaunch Your Series?

When I first heard about this idea of a relaunch, I had to slap my forehead that I'd never thought about it before.

Don't let the sales get you down Sokka

There's several considerations that make me very excited about the idea of relaunching a series. Basically it comes down to how different things are now versus then. By 'then', I mean when your given book or series first came out versus now.

The first and biggest thing that's probably changed is readers. Ebook market growth and book market growth has added millions every year. While many of these people are not wholly new to reading and books, think about how many launches and hot releases they weren't around for.

Therefore, if you have a book or series that's been out for several years,

There are millions, tens of millions even, of people who are in the market now that weren't around when your book was new.

I personally find that potential very exciting and that's what we're all about reaching today.

Also consider how you have (hopefully) grown as an author. How many more readers, many more connections, and much larger reach you have now versus when the work originally came out. Ask yourself, if you launched your old series today, how much better could you make that launch go?

Age isn't the only consideration for a relaunch however. Newer works that have had a lackluster reception are also likely targets. Many good books miss their mark with their marketing. Look at The Spirit Thief for example. Great book, but it had the wrong cover and so it didn't do well to start. Then Orbit put a new, much more appropriate cover on it, and relaunched the series. It's been doing well ever since!

So, with these exciting possibilities in mind, let's talk about what a relaunch entails.

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

If you've ever Googled "how to be a writer," chances are you've read something about using life experiences in your writing. There is, in fact, an entire school of thought that writers shouldn't write things they haven't personally experienced because if they haven't lived what they're writing, they don't know what they're talking about.

As a genre writer, I obviously disagree with this. If I only wrote about things I'd personally experienced, there'd be no dragons or wizards or sword fights to the death. No one get shot or stabbed or blasted with magic. If all writers followed this advice, the whole world would be trapped in realistic contemporary fiction forever, which I'm pretty sure is one of the levels of hell. (No offense to realistic contemporary writers, but come on. The world needs variety!)

But while I may never have actually been an ancient, future seeing dragon (I know, I know, I'm sorry to dash your hopes), I do know what it's like to lay careful plans that depend on the whims of other people. I know what it feels like to try very very hard and still fail. I also know what it feels like to win, to hate, to be head over heels in love, all that breadth of human emotion stuff. And this is what I think writers are really talking about when they say you have to live something before you write it.

Now, obviously, there are extremes. No matter how well I understand fear, my life has never really been in danger. I've never been a hostage or been mortally injured (at least not outside of a hospital without morphine). I can only speculate what it feels like to truly fear for my life. Likewise, I've never killed anyone, or even wanted to kill someone. As a very safe and privileged white woman in America, I've thankfully never had to experience any of these terrifying, extreme emotions, which means I can only imagine how my characters feel when I put them in these horrible situations.

But that's what writers do, isn't it? We imagine. We ask "what if?" and play pretend on paper for an audience, some of whom may actually have experienced the horrors I'm describing that I've been fortunate enough in my real life to avoid. But even though I've never actually lived what I'm describing, it's my job as an author to make it feel real, even for the people who've actually been there.

That's the challenge these writers are trying to conquer when they say you have to have experience to write. Again, though, I don't agree, because I believe that the power of the writing imagination trumps all. Obviously it's easier if you've lived the emotions you're trying to describe, but that's all it is: easier. Life experience is an aide, not a requirement for good fiction. After all, if we allowed our stories to be limited only to our own experiences, what kind of dull, unimaginative writers would we be?

So now that I've cleared that up, how do we actually do it? How do we imagine situations and feelings we've never experienced accurately and sincerely enough to convince readers that these things are real?

Unless you're writing your autobiography, this is a challenge all writers, and since it wouldn't be a Rachel Aaron post without a list, let's look at some solutions to this problem.

Monday, May 9, 2016

(Quick note from Rachel -- I had no idea he was writing this until he asked me to look it over for grammar and what not and it is the sweetest thing I have ever read! I AM KEEPING THIS FOREVER!!!)(Enjoy!)

Hi Folks, Travis here again,

The relaunching post is taking too long, so I have something else for you this week!

@Jeffnine on Twitter asked me about what I've learned about working as a team with Rachel. There's no way I can fit that response into twitter, so I thought that maybe ya'll would find a bit of our backstory interesting today since we don't really work like your normal team.

How Rachel and I Got Started

I can't talk about our team work without talking about the origins of this writing endeavor. Rachel and I met more than 14 years ago at the UGAnime club. Back in those crazy days of the fandom where we were just so happy to be in the presence of other anime fans that we'd all sing all the opening and closing songs together. (Alas, our dignity got in the way of that fun tradition eventually hahaha). I still know most of the words to Berserk's horrible "Tell Me Why" ending song though...

*Coughs* Anyway, once we were out of college and living just the two of us, Rachel one day told me about her Great Dream (TM) to become a published author. She promptly went and started writing shortly after that, getting up 2 hours before work every day to cram in writing time on her first novel. Also finding time to write at work as well. She was driven.

For me though, the key words here were "Great Dream". It's hard for me to explain without sounding cheesy, the authenticity of Rachel's driving lifelong ambition to be a successful author. She doesn't call it her great dream idly. I, however, found this to be immensely attractive. On top of, well, my existing attraction to her as the love of my life.

(Rachel note: *DIES*)

See, I'm just a guy who went to college 'cause that was what I was supposed to do as a white dude from a middle class family. No tears please haha, I'm aware my privilege is showing. I went into computer science because, well, I liked computers and what else was I going to do? To say I struggled in school is an understatement. Laziness and immaturity are only part of the reason why I took 7 years to get a bachelors.

So, having no real life ambitions of my own, but having grown up watching loads of anime full of nothing but people willing to die for their dreams, you might guess where this is going. Rachel, the woman I love, telling me about her great dream, and how high the walls on the way there were, was something I could absolutely throw myself into. It was the best...thing...ever.

applying to agents in the early 2000's be like...

I got to make her Great Dream, my Great Dream! ^___^ Honestly, this was the best way it could be for me. I'm basically a natural born follower. Taking the lead in anything other than running PnP RPGs is not my bag. If that makes you cringe a little, like I'm settling for less in life, please don't. I love it. Backing someone else's great dream is really, IMO, better than having one that's all my own. I won't do crap for "me", but I'll bust my butt for "us" all day every day.

I see myself more as Zoro helping Rachel become the Author King... or something like that

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Travis is reading it now, and given that he knocked out half the book in a single evening, I'm feeling pretty stoked about the finished product. I got to pack so many secrets into this book I've been waiting to reveal since the series started. The whole thing was author catnip, and I really really hope you enjoy it when it comes out in August! (And for those of you who are audio fans, I'm getting Audible the manuscript early this time, so the audio version should be out close to the ebook/print release date this time! Yay!)

Happy I was writing this book, though, I am very glad to finally be done with this project so I can move on to all the other stuff I have to do, such as writing blog posts! So, without further ado, let's talk about crafting an author persona.

To be perfectly honest, I don't even worry about sales/marketing/whatever until whatever book I'm going to be selling is almost done. Before that stage, my focus is entirely on telling the best story I can, because that's what really matters here. All the marketing in the world only makes a bad book fail faster, so clearly the Good Book is always our number one priority.

Even when the book is nearly done and it actually is time to market, I only really think about marketing in short bursts as necessary. This is partially because, important as marketing and promoting yourself is, nothing sells books like another book. Writing more is almost always the best thing you can do for your career.

That's great news for me, because by the time I'm done with one book, my brain is already miles ahead thinking about the next one. For me right now, that's Heartstrikers 4, which will probably be the final book in the series (I was planning on 5, but I covered a lot more of the meta plot than I was expecting in book 4, and I firmly feel that a series should end where it needs to, not where I want it to). When I do start a new series, though, I keep my brand in mind when sorting through all the new shiny ideas to find the new story I feel my audience will enjoy the most. I'm still writing what I want, just with an eye towards pleasing my fans and keeping my established brand strong.

So that's marketing, too. Really, though, there's only author promotion I think about at all stages of book creation and even in between novels, and that is my author persona.

Monday, May 2, 2016

Travis here again! Last week I talked about how to design your author brand. There was a fair amount of interest in niche appeal books, so that's what this week's topic is going to be about.

Whether your book is niche or if you are trying to reach a niche audience, hopefully you'll find this post to contain useful strategies.

Let's get into it shall we?

How To Reach Niche Audiences

Today I'd like to talk about reaching niche audiences. Originally, this post was for people who worried that their book(s) were niche. Twitter and blog comments have shown me though that folks are also interested in reaching said niche audiences, not just being relegated to them. So...

Should you worry about the niche?

Right now, Rachel and I are watching an anime called Silver Spoonon CrunchyRoll.

Its a farming anime!

On paper, this is 100% not our fare. We're hardcore genre fans. This is a contemporary drama about farming. No magic, no mystery, no action, no sci-fi, no futurism, it's not even historical. My shame is that I'd never even think about picking up a show/book like this on my own.

What drew us in was that we wanted another cooking anime (Shokugeki!!) to watch and this was vaguely sort of relevant since it dealt with food. Also very well rated, which helped.

So that's what we were expecting, but what we got was a well balanced show that is both serious and funny. It's very human and it wrestles with some amazingly deep and profound issues, tackling them with aplomb. It's my favorite thing to watch right now despite all the mecha and magical shows on my to-watch list.

What's the point here?

Anime has proven to me that you can make anything interesting and be successful at it. I hate sports, they all bore me to tears. Sports anime though? Sign me up! I never cared anything about soccer until I watched Giant Killing. Boxing? Meh.. Hajime No Ippo though? Glued to the screen! There are many, hugely popular basketball, swimming, and baseball anime shows now. Sports Tournament is now a full fledged genre and an intensely addictive one at that.

I've also watched baking animes, the Go anime, cooking animes, slow moving overly complicated math mysteries, magical realism nature shows, and more. All stuff that I don't normally like, but which the right anime can have the power to enthrall me with.

This extends to the ridiculous as well. I mean, look at One Piece! It's not just ridiculous, it's ludicrous! Yet it's the most successful anime/manga of all time (I'm pretty sure) and is still one of greatest stories I've ever seen.

This is all a long way of me saying that pretty much any idea can have wide spread commercial success when executed appropriately. What counts as appropriate execution however depends on the topic involved. Some things require more delicate and deliberate handling than others.

I'm sure ya'll want me to get to the meat here. There's more I want to say on widespread appeal, but that can come later. Lets talk about...

2k to 10k

If you like my writing posts, you'll love my book!

Coming Soon!

Out Now!

Kick-Ass Science Fiction

The Book That Started It All

Who are you again?

My name is Rachel Aaron/Rachel Bach, and I write the books you see over there on the left. I also play video games, watch anime, read manga, and read a TON of books. I love great sword fights, witty dialog, and charming rogues (except for the ones who stunlock me).